It’s ten minutes before a full run-through of Kill Me Now in a rehearsal space in South London. Greg Wise is kneeling at the end of a large bathtub, talking quietly to a technician. The words “pump” and “blockage” and “we’ll try it later” can be heard.
​Greg Wise and technical advisor Peter Large
The bath will have a prominent place on stage in Kill Me Now. Wise’s charact…

It's that time of year again, and a lot of my time this week has been spent watching children perform in carol concerts and Christmas shows. These performances vary in quality from the endearingly shambolic to the shockingly professional, but it seems there's always something that brings me up short. This year I listened to primary school children reading their own accounts of the nativity, and was struck by the way the originality and subjectiveness of their take on a well-worn tale, combined with the unselfconscious freshness of their language, made me - a fairly ja…

Last week I wrote about what a strain it can be to hear certain characters' voices, and to see them in three dimensions. (Other characters, it must be said, are so autonomous and assertive that they happily do your work for you.) In last week's case, it was in the end an actor who unknowingly helped me on my way to hauling that particular slippery character off the page and onto his feet.
Which brings me agreeably to one of my tasks this week: casting. The final step in making a chara…

Today I'm preparing for the masterclass on Researching Your Character that I'm running this Sunday. A few days ago I put out a tweet asking for people's experiences of, and views on, research for actors. There were some great replies ('sex in a carpark', from an actor-turned-director who shall remain nameless, being the most intriguing), but also some resistance. Some seem to think that research shouldn't be necessary; 'it should all be there i…